Scarring Darker Still
by Morglin Ar-Moriel
Summary: The story of Eöl’s life, from earliest childhood up until his fateful meeting with Aredhel. Rated T for Trauma! Chapter 2 coming soon.


Chapter 1.  
Hidden Away

Not a sniffle nor a whimper escaped them, though the tears from their wide black eyes pulsed steadily down their cheeks, quieter than the deepest rivers.

They crouched together on the cool earthen floor, and watched helplessly as their mother tied guards of flower-embossed leather on over her long, lithe arms and legs. She took up her wooden spear and slung her bow and quiver on her back. She shook forth her soft black hair in a concealing cloak to her knees. Only her boots showed, deerhide laced up the front with sinews.

Her son clung to her left foot, her daughter to her right. One voice inside her head begged her: _Nana, please don't go!_

She stood tall and resolute, spear in hand. _I thought you missed your father,_ she chided them. _Don't you want me to go find him?_

_Yes, _the girl-child wailed,_ but don't leave us alone!_

Her brother cried in agreement: _Take us with you!_

_It's much too dangerous. I'll be going farther into mountains than we have ever taken you. Bad things may be about. You two must stay right here, hidden safely away, and make no noise and no lights until we come back._

Again they begged as one: _Don't go!_

She shifted her feet. _Let go of me! I have no choice. You know how much I love him—_

_More than us?_

At that she knelt, and hugged them within her whispering hair. With her hair she wiped the tears from their faces, and she spoke eloquently to them with her starry black eyes. _My dears, I have loved him since the moment of my awakening, when first I opened my eyes beside him on that far-off shore…and the two of you, but three or four rabbits' lives, since you kindled within me like two little stars. _

She kissed her son, then her daughter. _Remember. Be quiet as mice and dark as moles. Do not leave the house, no matter what. We will return, both of us. I promise._

After she had slipped silently out the door, they lifted the heavy wooden bolt into place together, and set about not to think of her or their father. They looked at and handled and rearranged the various treasures that filled the house: smooth-polished stones from streams and roughly glittering ones from cliffs; birds' nests, with eggshells blue and white and speckled; feathers of ravens and swans and eagles; iridescent fish scales; dead butterflies and jewellike beetles that seemed yet to live, perched on dried plants and flowers and on those that bloomed without light in pots made from dyed earth. They played every game they could think of, trading these objects back and forth, feeling and relating their stories. They drew designs in the ashes of the cold firepit with their fingers, and they tried to tell each other the stories their parents had told them.

They had a perfect shimmering picture, in their minds, of their parents lying side by side, pillowed on their hair, on the rippling shore of that wide lovely lake, which murmured softly as it turned the blazing stars into endless waves of light across its dark surface. They lay by the firepit, the boy-child playing the part of their father, the girl of their mother. They first blinked their eyes, mirroring those same stars. Then they sat up and ran their hands wonderingly over the beauty of their own bodies. At last they turned toward one another, reaching out with joyful recognition to touch for the first time.

There were lots of other people there by the lake. But they liked to all join their voices and sing to the stars, so that Nana and Ada could not hear the trees whispering on the wind, or the thoughts of the tiny creatures in the grass, or the great ones moving far off in the shadows. So together they wandered far from the others, until they heard their voices no more. They built this house deep in the pathless forest, in the darkest nook they could find, but not far from a glade where the blue-white star-beams struck the violet-strewn grass. And after a time, they brought forth twin children, male and female—miraculous tiny versions of themselves.

The house where the children were begotten and born and had lived all their brief lives squatted between two gigantic oaks…two of the first, surely, to spring from the bare earth of Arda…the gnarled roots of which formed parts of its walls. The remainder, of piled-up rocks and packed earth, were disguised with green-growing moss and ivy. Ivy knit together the woven boughs of its roof. Heavy black bearskins hung over the wind-eyes and the opening above the firepit, to keep what little light the family used from giving their sanctuary away. The children had been left in the faint greenish glow of the phosphorescent fungi on two or three decaying hunks of wood, such as commonly sprouted in the damp beneath the trees.

The darkness seemed far friendlier with their parents there, constantly cuddling them; and the forest outside less frightening, when they all went out to play their games in it. The children had learned to move among the shadows without snapping a twig, to stalk and hide so that the most cunning wolf or cautious stag would never suspect their presence, to summon birds to their hands and mimic their calls. Sometimes they would hold onto their parents' backs when they climbed up into the treetops for fruit or nuts. Sometimes they would all go to the glade, where the children romped like rabbits among the violets, until they were tired enough to crawl into the adults' laps and gaze up with them at the source of the cool, twinkling light.

The stars did not change. Their parents told time (when they felt the need to, which was seldom) in bees' lives, rabbits' lives, deer's lives, and turtles' lives. They had no way of knowing how long it had been since their father went out to spear a pig for them to feast on—only that he hadn't returned.

Neither did their mother.

Never in their lives had they been left alone before. Always, when their father or mother went out to hunt, the other would stay with the children. Now, they had only each other to cling to.

They got into their parents' heaping bed of furs, which still smelled warmly of them and their love, of the private games they played when the children slept in their own furs in the corner where the ceiling slanted low. There they did their best to cuddle each other to sleep. Even as the tears oozed out of their tightly closed eyes, they made not the smallest sound.

They drank the rain-pot dry. For a while they did nothing but listen intently to the distant babble of the stream off in the forest. But they obeyed their mother, and stayed inside, and waited for more rain to fall.

Handful by handful, they ate all the dried meat and fruit and nuts and mushrooms in the house.

They had no way of knowing how long after that…long enough, at any rate, that they had begun to chew on each other's hair and nails…they were trying to sleep to escape their hunger, when something started scratching the outside of the wall.

They sat up, hair spilling about in neglected tangles. Their white-edged eyes followed the noise as it raked deliberately in one direction around the side of the house, along with something large, tripping and dragging over the oak roots.

Panic echoed back and forth between their racing minds: _What is it?_

_Not wolves. Not a bear._

_Bad things?_

_Don't move. Don't breathe._

_I'm not._

They shuddered violently, gasping against their wills, at the deep, hacking growl the thing outside let out—then blinked in wild hope at the sound that followed. Their father's voice, which they had barely heard enough times to count on both hands since they were born, not howling like a wolf or trumpeting like a swan, but calling them out loud: "Dear ones! Little ones! We're home! Where is that door?"

Astonished, they called back with their minds: _Ada! Nana found you!_

He did not seem to hear them. The girl-child spoke bravely up, her voice high and thin: "Who is there?"

This time their mother's voice shocked them. "We who begot you, silly girl! Don't be difficult, now. Open up!"

The scratching moved on in the same direction, closer and closer to the door. The children tossed off the furs and cautiously approached. _Should we let them in?_

_Is it really them?_

_Yes, but…no. I don't know._

_Or is something tricking us?_

A hand plunged straight through the earthen wall next to the door. They leaped back, squeaking like a pair of startled mice. It was their father's hand, but his fingernails had grown long, curved and darkened like the talons of a bird of prey…and not all of its greenish tint was cast by the glowing fungi.

The taloned hand lifted the bolt. The door crashed open. The creatures silhouetted in the web of starlight weeping down through the trees had their parents' shapes, but none of their grace. They shoved and shuffled over the narrow threshold. Their thick, shining black hair…which they had taken such joy in combing out with their long clever fingers, laying their heads in each other's laps…was dull and snarled with grime. Their soft leather garments hung in shreds, stained with dried blood and something else, black and reeking.

The boy-child held out a trembling hand, even as he cringed backward. _Ada, you're hurt all over._

The girl-child's faint voice wavered. "Nana, where _were_ you? We've been so hungry…"

Their mother knelt and opened her arms. "Come with us, dearlings." Her befouled hair clotted over her face, but not nearly enough. "Let's go get something good to eat. You're so weak—we'll carry you all the way."

She backed away, pressing close to her brother. "Come where?"

"Why, to the house of our new master. We told him we had two pretty children, and he's terribly eager to meet you."

The boy spoke out for the first time. "What's a _master?_ I don't like that word. And I don't like how you smell. We're not going anywhere."

His father laughed—a sound that made the boy's stomach clench like a fist. "We _made_ you, son, as he made us. You'll go where we will." He stooped and picked up his daughter, who happened to be slightly closer.

She shrieked like a rabbit in the jaws of a wolf.

The boy didn't even think. He sank his teeth, with all his might, into his father's bare calf. A hideous poison…the very essence of pain, and hate, and hopeless living death…flooded his mouth. His father rasped something in an unknown tongue, and dropped his sister. She rolled between his feet and scooted out the door—the rabbit down its hole.

The boy bolted after her. His mother caught him by the arm, stabbing her ragged talons into his flesh. He flailed his other arm, struck her across the face, dug his tiny fingers desperately into one starless eye. The talons withdrew. He tore free and left her screeching.

Always before, when they played their sneaking and hiding games in the forest, however silently they moved, however they melted into the overlapping shadows, their parents could find them and pounce upon them without so much as a rustle. Now they beat clumsily through the bushes, calling out in their strange hoarse voices: "How can you do this to us, son? Your poor mother's half-blind now! Come back here at once! Your father commands you!"

"And you, my precious daughter! Where are you?"

He scraped his mother's eye off his fingers upon a shaggy-barked hickory trunk. The punctures in his arm stung in time with his thudding heart. His throat was still trying to jump inside-out, to slough the residue of his father's transformed blood, but there was nothing in his belly to vomit.

His sister found him by no more than the feeble warmth of his body. Their hands fused together, and they fled through the dark, dangerous forest, mindful only of the danger behind them.

The forest took them in without questions. It tripped and snagged the monsters who pursued them, making them curse in tones of gurgling slime and ripping flesh. Low-hanging boughs and brambles dipped and swayed about them on every side, leading them gently into their deepest, most moss-cushioned shadows—hiding them away.


End file.
